THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION IN THE SOUTH
Two questions may be asked of any group of human beings: first, How do
they earn their living, and secondly, What is their attitude toward
life? The first relates to the economic history and condition of that
people; the second is a study of their religion. In these two essays I
am to treat the first of these questions under the subject: The
Economic Revolution in the South, and the second under the subject:
Christianity in the South.
The last century was notable because of the great change in method and
organization of human work and we call the early part of the
nineteenth century the time of economic revolution in Europe and to
some extent in America. The southern United States, however, while
profoundly influenced by this revolution from the first, has not
until to-day actually felt its full effect. The new factory system of
the early nineteenth century is just to-day appearing in the South,
and yet its appearance in England and New England seventy-five years
ago made the South a part of the world industrial organization by
making it the seat of cotton culture (see Note [1]).
Two diverse developments resulted: In England and the North came a
change from household industry to social industry, a step forward
which led to an era of machinery, to a curious concentration of
individuals and wealth and the necessities of living in certain great
centres. That very concentration led to a wonderful contact of man
with man which sharpened mind and sharpened thought and in the long
run made the Europe of to-day. On the other hand, the southern United
States, though really a part of this great system through its work of
furnishing raw cotton, did not come into the whirl of the new
industry because she had an industrial system which forbade machinery,
discouraged human contact, and shackled thought.
Why did this system of slavery persist so long in the South as to be
caught in the vortex of the new industrial movement and rendered
almost inextricable?
If the South had been a place of intelligent farmers on small farms,
we could imagine a development which would have been the wonder of the
world; but because the fathers of the United States were so busy with
large questions that they forgot larger ones, so busy settling matters
of commerce and representation and politics that they forgot matters
of work and justice and human rights--because of this we have in the
South one of those curious back eddies of human progress that twist
and puzzle advance and thought.
The very forward forces of industry that fastened slavery on the South
were weaving a social system which made the enslavement of laborers
impossible and unprofitable. Consequently at the very time when the
South ought to have been increasing in intelligence, law and order,
the use of machinery, industrial concentration, and the intensive
culture of land with the rest of the world, she lost a half century in
a development backward toward a dispersing of population, extensive
rather than intensive land culture, increased and compulsory ignorance
of the laboring class, and the rearing of a complete system of caste
and aristocracy (see Note 2).
Evils there were to be sure in the new factory system of Europe and
the North, evils which southern leaders did not fail to note and gloat
over, but they were evils of another and newer industrial era, which
did not stop progress, but gave it added incentive.
The industrial back-set of the South meant of course but one thing:
the discovery of the paradox of slavery, the turning from the
mistake, and the adoption of remedial measures which should usher into
the South the same industrial revolution in methods of work which
Europe saw begin a century ago. This is exactly what has happened, and
to-day the Industrial Revolution is beginning south of Mason and
Dixon's line. The forecast of change was apparent by 1850. Slavery
still paid then--was still an economic success, but only under
conditions which became more and more impossible of realization
because of the factory system and the new industrial conditions in the
rest of the world (see Note 3).
It was, in other words, an attempt at an industrial system with the
lowest wages, the most oppressive labor laws, and the best natural
advantages. Such a system at such a time carried its own sentence of
death: fertile land was becoming scarce in the forties, the horrors of
the slave trade had shocked even the eighteenth century, and southern
labor laws which made knowledge a crime and migration of laborers a
capital offense, simply could not be enforced. It was in vain that the
solidly united capitalistic classes of the South threw themselves
bodily into the fray--raped Mexico, filibustered in Cuba and Central
America, encouraged slave-smuggling (see Note 4), and bullied the
hesitating North; their economic doom was written even if militant
Abolitionism had not appeared.
The economic student could have foretold and did foretell easily in
the forties and fifties that slavery in the South was doomed (see Note
5): even if all available territory had been thrown wide to the slave
system, slavery could not possibly have stayed in Kansas and Utah, in
New Mexico or in Arizona; it could have stayed only temporarily in
Missouri and in Texas. It had already reached its territorial limit,
it was bound to have evolved something different. It will always be an
interesting speculation as to how soon this economic necessity would
have been recognized; whether the South would have had the acumen
eventually to see the end, and what sort of gradual change could have
come about, had it not been for the political crisis precipitated in
1861.
Then came the war--that disgraceful episode of civil strife when,
leaving the arguments of men, the nation appealed to the last resort
of dogs, murdering and ravishing each other for four long shameful
years (see Note 6).
When this nightmare had passed there came, after the resulting period
of disorder, a new regime, a new problem of labor, a new industrial
order. Not only that, but gradually in the decade 1870-1880 there were
added to the South four new economic activities: first, the iron
industry; second, the manufacture of cotton cloth; third, the
transportation of these goods to, from, and through the South; and
fourth, the general exchange of goods in this growing Southern
industrial population--in other words, the Industrial Revolution was
beginning in the South. So that the South of the 80's was a different
South from the South of the 60's, not simply by reason of emancipation
but by reason of new economic possibilities.
However, this change could not go on unhindered by the mistakes of the
past. With all that was new in the South, there was also much that was
old, and of these old things the most important were the Ideals which
slavery handed down--ideals of government, of labor, of caste.
Consequently when the South tried to use its new freed labor on its
new industrial possibilities, it went to the problem full of the
ideals of slavery, and it made four separate attempts. In the first
place it was perfectly natural for a land which had said for
generations that free Negro labor was an impossibility, and free Negro
citizens unthinkable, to cherish a very distinct idea that the way to
get along with the emancipated Negro was to make him a slave in fact
if not in name. The idea that was back of the first apprentice laws
and the various labor codes passed directly after Lee's surrender was
that the labor of the blacks belonged to the former white owners by
right and could be directed only by force under a nominal wage system.
These labor codes therefore attempted to reestablish slavery without a
slave trade (see Note 7).
These ill-advised attempts were frustrated by the Fifteenth Amendment
which made the freedmen voters. The Thirteenth Amendment did not
abolish slavery--it directed its abolition and the answer to it was
the labor codes. The Fourteenth Amendment gave the freedmen civil
rights and put a premium on granting them political rights, but the
premium was not accepted and the civil rights remained unenforced. The
Fifteenth Amendment went to the root of the matter by putting local
political power into the hands of the freedmen and their friends and
this made slavery and the slave system impossible.
What the nation had before it then was not the nice academic question
as to whether it would be better to have as voters men of intelligence
or men of ignorance, whether it would be better to throw into the
electorate of a great modern country a mass of slaves or a mass of
college graduates--no such question came before the country; it was,
as we are fond of saying, a situation and not a theory that confronted
the country and that situation was this: here in the South we had
attempted to abolish slavery by act of legislature--it was not
abolished. The people who hitherto held power did not believe in its
real abolishment; a great and growing economic revolution fronted
them, cotton was still king. They were about to solve that problem--to
meet the Revolution--according to their former labor ideals.
One could not expect any other outcome. One could not in justice ask
them voluntarily to accept free black labor; the only possible way to
insure the solving of that economic problem with labor really free was
to put in the South a political power which should make slavery in
fact or inference forever impossible. This truth the great Thaddeus
Stephens saw, and with a statesmanship far greater than Lincoln's he
forced Negro suffrage on the South.
Although the new voters thus introduced in the South were crude and
ignorant, and in many ways ill-fitted to rule, nevertheless in the
fundamental postulates of American freedom and democracy they were
sane and sound. Some of them were silly, some were ignorant, and some
were venal, but they were not as silly as those who had fostered
slavery in the South, nor as ignorant as those who were determined to
perpetuate it, and the black voters of South Carolina never stole half
as much as the white voters of Pennsylvania are stealing to-day.
The eternal monument to these maligned victims of a nation's wrong is
the fact that they began the abolition of slavery in fact and not
merely attack it in theory, they established free schools, and they
passed laws on all subjects under which the white South is still
content to live (see Note 8). If these men had been protected in their
legal rights by the strong arm of the government, they would have been
able to protect themselves in a generation or so. They would have
increased in intelligence, responsibility, and power, and this the
South was determined to prevent. The North wavered; having put its
hand to the plow it looked back, and gradually allowed the black
peasantry of the South to be almost completely disfranchised. What
happened?
The time had passed for a reestablishment of slavery, but serfdom and
peonage were still possible and probable. When you have the leading
classes of a country with the ideal of slavery in their minds and the
laboring classes ignorant and without political power, there is but
one system that can ensue and that is serfdom, and through serfdom was
the second way in which the South strove to meet its great post-bellum
economic problem.
Given these premises the economic answer of the South was, from a
business standpoint, perfectly sound. The men who, starting poor after
a miserable war, went into the development of the South, went in to
make money--to use the great American thesis, they were "not in
business for their health." They were going to grant to the laborer
just as little as they must; the laborer was unused to a system of
free labor, he was not a steady workman, he was not a skilled workman,
he had been for two or three hundred years driven to his work, he took
no pride in his work--how could he take pride in that which hitherto
had been the badge of his shame?
Now it was not considered the business of the new Southern business
man to develop and train the working man. It was his business, as I
have said, from the American point of view, to make money. And the
consequence was that he evolved a peculiarly ingenious system of land
serfdom, which bears many likenesses to the serfdom that replaced
slavery in Europe. The land belonged to the landlord--it was rented
out to the serf; the serf was nominally free, but as a matter of fact
he was not free at all; he was held to his labor: he rose with the
morning work bell of slavery days, he was driven to his labor by
mounted riders, he was whipped for delinquencies, he received no
stipulated return, but on the contrary the owner of the land made the
contract, kept the accounts, and gave him enough once or twice a year
to make him not too dissatisfied.
After a time this changed somewhat; instead of the land owner himself
undertaking the advancing of supplies, a third party, the merchant
with capital, came in. In order to enforce such a system it needed to
be backed by a peculiar law system--therefore the business men went
into politics in the South with the same result as when business men
go into politics in the North. Things were done quickly and quietly;
they were done not for the good of people who had no political voice,
but for the good of those who wielded the political power, _i.e._, the
business men and land owners. The laws were made to favor the landlord
and the merchant and to make it easy to exploit the tenant and
laborer.
This system, which still is the rule of agricultural labor in the
black belt of the South, is not a system of free labor; it is simply
a form of peonage. The black peon is held down by perpetual debt or
petty criminal judgments; his rent rises with the price of cotton, his
chances to buy land are either non-existent or confined to infertile
regions. Judge and jury are in honor bound to hold him down; if by
accident or miracle he escapes and becomes a landholder, his property,
civil and political status are still at the mercy of the worst of the
white voters, and his very life at the whim of the mob. The power of
the individual white patron to protect colored men is still great and
is often exercised, but this is but another argument against the
system: it is undemocratic and un-American, and stamps on the serf
system its most damning criticism.
Moreover, this second attempt to meet the economic revolution of the
South is failing, and its failure is shown by the scarcity of farm
labor, the migration of Negroes, and the increase of crime and
lawlessness. Serfdom like slavery demands ignorance and strict laws.
The decade of Negro voting and Northern benevolence had however given
the Negro schools and aspiration.
What now has been the reaction of this group on the environment thrown
around it since slavery days?
The slaves had their select classes in the house servants and the
artisans. After freedom came, the Negro made four distinct efforts to
reach economic safety. The first effort was by means of the select
house-servant class; the second, by means of competitive industry; the
third, by land-owning; and the fourth, by what I shall call the group
economy.
First, let us look at the effort of the house servants. The one person
under the slave regime who came nearest to escaping from the toils of
slavery and the disabilities of caste was the favorite house servant.
This was because the house servant was brought into contact with the
culture of the master and the family, because he had often the
advantages of town and city life, was able to gain some smattering of
education, and also because he was usually a blood relative of the
master class. These house servants, therefore, became the natural
leaders of the emancipated race and the brunt of the burden of
reconstruction fell upon their shoulders. When the history of this
period is carefully written it will show that few men ever made a more
meritorious fight against overwhelming odds.
Under free competition it would have been natural for this class of
house servants to enter the economic life of the nation directly. In
some cases this happened, especially in the case of the barber and the
caterer. For the most part, however, the black applicant was refused
admittance to the economic society of the nation. He held his own in
the semi-servile work of barber until he met the charge of color
discrimination in his own race, and the competition of foreigners. The
caterer was displaced by palatial hotels in which he could have no
part.
On the whole, then, the mass of house servants soon found the doors in
their own lines closed in their faces. They could remain good servants
but they could not by this means often escape into higher walks of
life. The better tenth of them went gradually into professions and
thus found economic independence for themselves and their children.
The mass of them either remained house servants or turned toward
industry.
The second attempt of the freedmen toward economic safety lay in
industry. It was a less ambitious effort than that of the house
servants, and included larger numbers of men. It was characterized by
a large migration to the towns. Here it was that the class of slave
artisans made themselves felt in freedom and they were joined by
numbers of unskilled workmen, such as steam railway hands, porters,
hostlers, etc. This class attracted considerable attention and bore
the brunt of the economic battle in competition with white working
men. It is a class that is growing and in the future it is going to
have a large development. At present, however, its fight is difficult.
The third effort of economic elevation was by land owning. This was
the ideal toward which the great mass of black people looked. They at
first thought that the government was going to help them, and the
government did in a few instances, as when Sherman distributed land in
Georgia and the government sold South Carolina lands for taxes. For
the most part, however, the Negroes had to buy their own lands which
they did in some cases by means of their bounty money for serving in
the army or by means of special monies which they earned as workmen
during the war or by the help of the former masters. Some too, by the
share tenant system gained enough to buy land. In this way about
200,000 to-day own their farms and thus approximate economic
independence.
The fourth and last effort, which I call the Group Economy, is of
great importance, but is not very well understood. It consists of a
cooperative arrangement of industry and service in a group which tends
to make the group a closed economic circle, largely independent of
surrounding whites. This development explains many anomalies in the
situation of the Negro. Many people think that the colored barber is
disappearing, yet there are more colored barbers in the United States
to-day than ever before, but a larger number than ever cater to only
colored trade. The Negro lawyer serves almost exclusively colored
clientage, so that his existence is half forgotten by the white world.
The new Negro business men are not successors of the old. There used
to be Negro business men in Northern cities and a few even in Southern
cities, but they catered to white trade; the Negro business man to-day
caters to colored trade. So far has this gone to-day that in every
city in the United States which has considerable Negro population, the
colored group is serving itself in religion, medical care, legal
advice and often educating its children. In growing degree also it is
serving itself in insurance, houses, books, amusements.
So extraordinary has been this development that it forms a large and
growing part in the economy of perhaps half the Negroes of the United
States, and in the case of perhaps 100,000 town Negroes, representing
at least 300,000 persons, the group economy approaches a complete
system. To these we may add the bulk of 200,000 farmers who own their
farms. Thus we have a group of half a million who are reaching
economic safety by means of group economy (see Note 9).
Here then are the two developments--a determined effort at an
established serfdom on the part of landholding capitalists, and a
determined effort on the part of freedmen and their sons to attain
economic independence.
While both these movements were progressing the full change of the
industrial revolution, so long postponed, began to be felt all over
the South; the iron and steel industry developed in Alabama and
Tennessee, coal mining in Tennessee and West Virginia, and cotton
manufacture in Carolina and Georgia; railways were consolidated into
systems and extended, commerce was organized and concentrated. The
greatest single visible result of this was the growth of cities. Towns
of eight thousand and more had a tenth of the white Southerners in
1860; they held a seventh of a much larger population in 1900, while
a fifth were in cities and villages. Still more striking was the
movement of Negroes; only four per cent. were in cities before the
war, to-day a seventh are there.
The reason for this is clear: the oppression and serfdom of the
country, the opportunities of the city. It was in the town and city
alone that the emerging classes, outside the landholders, were
successful, and even the landholders were helped by the earnings of
the city; the house servants with the upper class of barbers and
caterers, the artisans, the day laborers, the professional men,
including the best of the teachers, were in the cities, and the new
group economy was developed here.
On the other hand one of the inevitable expedients for fastening
serfdom on the country Negro was enforced ignorance.
The Negro school system established by the Negro reconstruction
governments reached its culmination in the decade 1870-1880. Since
then determined effort has been made in the country districts to make
the Negro schools less efficient. To-day these schools are worse than
they were twenty years ago; the nominal term is longer and the
enrolment larger, but the salaries are so small that only the poorest
local talent can teach. There is little supervision, there are few
appliances, few schoolhouses and no inspiration. On the other hand the
city schools have usually improved. It was natural that the Negro
should rush city-ward toward freedom, education, and decent wages.
This migration resulted in two things: in the increase and
intensification of the problems of the city, and in redoubled effort
to keep the Negro laborer on the plantations.
To take the latter efforts first, we find that the efforts of the
landlords to keep Negro labor varied from force to persuasion: force
was used by the landlords to the extent of actual peonage, by which
Negroes were held on plantations in large numbers; next to peonage for
crime came debt peonage, which used the indebtedness of the Negro
tenants to prevent their moving away; then came the system of labor
contracts and the laws making the breaking of a labor contract a crime
(see Note 10); after that came a crop of vagrancy laws aimed at the
idle Negroes in city and town and designed to compel them to work on
farms, going so far in several states as to reverse the common law
principle and force the person arrested for vagrancy to prove his
innocence (see Note 11).
In order that the farm laborers should not be tempted away by higher
wages, penalties were laid on "enticing laborers away" and agents were
compelled to take out licenses which ran as high as $2,000 for each
county in some states (see Note 12). Such laws and their
administration required, of course, absolute control of the
government and courts. This was secured by manipulation and fraud,
while at the same time the landlords of the black belt usually opposed
the disfranchisement of Negroes lest such a measure reduce their
political influence which was based on the Negro population.
All these measures were measures of force, while nothing was done to
attract laborers to the land. The only real attraction of the Negro to
the country was landowning. The Negroes had succeeded in buying land:
by government gift and bounty money they held about three million
acres in 1875, perhaps 8,000,000 in 1890, and 12,000,000 in 1900; but
distinct efforts appeared here and there to stop their buying land.
There are still vast tracts of land in the South, that anybody, black
or white, can buy for little or nothing, simply because it is worth
little or nothing. Some time, of course, these lands will become
valuable but they are not valuable to-day. Now the Negro cannot invest
in this land as a speculation, for he is too poor to wait. He must
have land which he knows how to cultivate, which is near a market, and
which is so situated as to provide reasonable protection for his
family. There are only certain crops which he knows how to cultivate.
He cannot be expected to learn quickly to cultivate crops which he was
not taught to cultivate in the past. He must be within reach of a
market and he must have some community life with his own people and
some protection from other people.
All these conditions are fulfilled chiefly in the black belt. That is
the cotton region, the crop which he knows best how to raise; from
certain parts of it he can get to the market and he has a great black
population for company and protection. But it is precisely here in the
black belt that it is most difficult to buy land. Capitalistic culture
of cotton, the high price of cotton, and the system of labor peonage
have made land high. Moreover in most of these regions it is
considered bad policy to sell Negroes land because, as has been said,
this "demoralizes" labor. Thus in the densest part of the black belt
in the South, the percentage of land holding is usually low among
Negroes.
The concentration of land-owning on the other hand in the hands of the
single white proprietors has gone on to a much larger extent than the
country realizes. This is shown not simply in the increase of the
average size of farms in the last decade but it must also be
remembered that the farms do not belong to single owners but are owned
in groups of five, forty or fifty by single landed proprietors. There
are 140,000 owners who own from two to fifty farms in the South and
there are 50,000 owners who have over twenty farms apiece.
It is not true then to-day that land-buying for the average colored
farmer in the South is an easy thing. The land which has been bought
has been bought by the exceptional men or by the men who have had
unusual opportunity, who have been helped by their former masters or
by some other patrons, who have been aided by members of their own
families in the North or in the cities, or who have escaped the
wretched crop system by some sudden rise in the price of cotton, which
did not enable the landlord to take the whole economic advantage. It
is therefore in spite of the land system and not because of it that
the Negroes to-day own 12,000,000 acres of land (see Note 13).
The net result of the whole policy of serfdom was so to deplete the
ranks of laborers that a new solution of the labor problem must be
found.
Here it was that the southern city came forward. The city had new
significance, especially new cities like Atlanta, Birmingham, and
Chattanooga as contrasted with Charleston and Savannah. They saw a
new industrial solution of the problem of Negro labor. It was a simple
program: Industry and disfranchisement; the separation of the masses
of the Negroes from all participation in government, and such
technical training as should fit them to become skilled working men.
There was an _arriere pensee_ here too, born in the minds of northern
capitalists. The white southern working men were becoming unionized by
northern agitators; here was a chance to keep them down to reasonable
demands by black competition and the threat of more competition in the
future. Moreover working men without votes would be far more docile
and tractable. Politics had already spoiled the Negroes. Let the
whites rule and the blacks work.
The plea was specious, it had the sanction of great names, of wealth
and social influence, and it convinced not only those who wanted to be
convinced but practically all Americans who were eager to be relieved
of troublesome questions and difficult public duties.
All the more eagerly was this solution seized upon because of the
definite and distinct promises which it made. Disfranchise the Negro,
said the South, and the race problem is solved; there is no race
problem save the menace of an ignorant and venal vote;--relieve us
from this and the lion and the lamb will lie down together;--the Negro
will go peacefully and contentedly to work and the whites will wax
just and rich. We all remember with what confidence and absolute
certainty of conviction this program was announced when Mississippi
disfranchised her Negro voters seventeen years ago. It was repeated
twelve years ago in South Carolina, ten years ago in Louisiana, and
still more recently in North Carolina and Alabama.
What has been the result? Is the race problem solved? Is the Negro out
of politics in the South? Has there been a single southern campaign
in the last twenty years in which the Negro has not figured as the
prime issue? Have the southern representatives in Congress any settled
convictions or policy save hatred of black men, and can they discuss
any other matter? Is it not the irony of fate that in the state that
first discovered the legal fraud of disfranchisement a hot political
battle is to-day waging on the old, old question: the right of black
men to vote?
The reason for all this is not far to seek. In modern industrial
democracy disfranchisement is impossible. The fate, wishes, and
destiny of ten million human beings cannot be delivered, sealed and
bound into the keeping of Dixon, Tillman, Vardaman, and Nelson Page.
They are bound to vote even when disfranchised.
Disfranchised and voiceless though I am in Georgia to-day by the
illegal White Primary system, there are still fifty congressmen in
Washington fraudulently representing me and my fellows in the
councils of the nation (see Note 14).
It was promised that disfranchisement would lead to more careful
attention to the Negro's moral and economic advancement. It has on the
contrary stripped them naked to their enemies; discriminating laws of
all sorts have followed, the administration of other laws has become
harsher and more unfair, school funds have been curtailed and
education discouraged, and mobs and murder have gone on.
If the new policy has been a farce politically and socially, how much
more has it failed as an economic cure-all! No sooner was it
proclaimed from the house-tops than the rift in the lute appeared. "We
do not want educated farmers," cried the landlords, "we want docile
laborers." "We do not want educated Negro artisans," cried the white
artisans, and they enforced their demands by their votes and by mob
violence. "We do not want to raise the Negro; we want to put him in
his place and keep him there," cried the dominant forces of the South.
Then those northerners who had lightly embraced the fair sounding
program of limited labor training and disfranchisement found
themselves grasping the air.
Not only this, but the South itself faced a puzzling paradox. The
industrial revolution was demanding labor; it was demanding
intelligent labor, while the supposed political and social exigences
of the situation called for ignorance and subserviency. It was an
impossible contradiction and the South to-day knows it.
What is it that makes a successful laboring force? It is laborers of
education and natural intelligence, reasonably satisfied with their
conditions, inspired with certain ideals of life, and with a growing
sense of self-respect and self-reliance. How is the caste system of
the South influencing the Negro laborer? It is systematically
restricting his development; it is restricting his education so that
the public common schools of the South except in a few cities are
worse this moment than they were twenty years ago; it is seeking to
kill self-respect by putting upon the accident of color every mark of
humiliation that it can invent; it is discouraging self-reliance by
treating a class of men as wards and children; it is killing ambition
by drawing a color line instead of a line of desert and
accomplishment; and finally, through these things, it is encouraging
crime, and by the unintelligent and brutal treatment of criminals, it
is developing more crime.
This general attitude toward the main laboring class reflects itself
less glaringly but as certainly in the treatment even of white
laborers. So long as white labor must compete with black labor, it
must approximate black labor conditions--long hours, small wages,
child labor, labor of women, and even peonage. Moreover it can raise
itself above black labor only by a legalized caste system which will
cut off competition and this is what the South is straining every
nerve to create.
The last fatal campaign in Georgia which culminated in the Atlanta
Massacre was an attempt, fathered by conscienceless politicians, to
arouse the prejudices of the rank and file of white laborers and
farmers against the growing competition of black men, so that black
men by law could be forced back to subserviency and serfdom. It
succeeded so well that smouldering hate burst into flaming murder
before the politicians could curb it.
There is, however, a limit to this sort of thing. The day when mobs
can successfully cow the Negro to willing slavery is past. The Atlanta
Negroes shot back and shot to kill, and that stopped the riot with a
certain suddenness (see Note 15). The South is realizing that
lawlessness and economic advance cannot coexist. If the wonderful
industrial revolution is to develop unhindered, the South must have
law and order and it must have intelligent workmen.
It is only a question of time when white working men and black working
men will see their common cause against the aggressions of exploiting
capitalists. Already there are signs of this: white and black miners
are working as a unit in Alabama; white and black masons are in one
union in Atlanta (see Note 16). The economic strength of the Negro
cannot be beaten into weakness, and therefore it must be taken into
partnership, and this the Southern white working man, befuddled by
prejudice as he is, begins dimly to realize.
It is this paradox that brings us to-day in the South to a fourth
solution of the problem: Immigration. The voice that calls foreign
immigrants southward to-day is not single but double. First, the
exploiter of common labor wishes to exploit this new labor just as
formerly he exploited Negro labor. On the other hand the far-sighted
ones know that the present freedom of labor exploitation must
pass--that some time or other the industrial system of the South must
be made to conform more and more to the growing sense of industrial
justice in the North and in the civilized world. Consequently the
second object of the immigration philosopher is to make sure that,
when the rights of the laborer come to be recognized in the South,
that laborer will be white, and just so far as possible the black
laborer will still be forced down below the white laborer until he
becomes thoroughly demoralized or extinct.
The query is therefore: If immigration turns toward the South as it
undoubtedly will in time, what will become of the Negro? The view of
the white world is usually that there are two possibilities. First,
that the immigrants will crush the Negro utterly; or secondly, that by
competition there will come a sifting which will lead to the survival
of the best in both groups of laborers.
Let us consider these possibilities. First it is certain that so far
as the Negroes are land holders, and so far as they belong to a
self-employing, self-supplying group economy, no possible competition
from without can disturb them. I have shown already how rapidly this
system is growing. Further than that, there is a large group of
Negroes who have already gained an assured place in the national
economy as artisans, servants, and laborers. The worst of these may be
supplanted, but the best could not be unless there came a sudden
unprecedented and improbable influx of skilled foreign labor. A slow
infiltration of foreigners cannot displace the better class of Negro
workers; simply because the growing labor demand of the South cannot
spare them. If then it is to be merely a matter of ability to work,
the result of immigration will on the whole be beneficial and will
differentiate the good Negro workman from the careless and
indifferent.
But one element remains to be considered, and this is political power.
If the black workman is to remain disfranchised while the white native
and immigrant not only has the economic defense of the ballot, but the
power to use it so as to hem in the Negro competitor, cow and
humiliate him and force him to a lower plane, then the Negro will
suffer from immigration.
It is becoming distinctly obvious to Negroes that to-day, in modern
economic organization, the one thing that is giving the workman a
chance is intelligence and political power, and that it is utterly
impossible for a moment to suppose that the Negro in the South is
going to hold his own in the new competition with immigrants if, on
the one hand, the immigrant has access to the best schools of the
community and has equal political power with other men to defend his
rights and to assert his wishes, while, on the other hand, his black
competitor is not only weighed down by past degradation, but has few
or no schools and is disfranchised.
The question then as to what will happen in the South when immigration
comes, is a very simple question. If the Negro is kept disfranchised
and ignorant and if the new foreign immigrants are allowed access to
the schools and given votes as they undoubtedly will be, then there
can ensue only accentuated race hatred, the spread of poverty and
disease among Negroes, the increase of crime, and the gradual murder
of the eight millions of black men who live in the South except in so
far as they escape North and bring their problems there as thousands
will.
If on the contrary, with the coming of the immigrants to the South,
there is given to the Negro equal educational opportunity and the
chance to cast his vote like a man and be counted as a man in the
councils of the county, city, state and nation, then there will ensue
that competition between men in the industrial world which, if it is
not altogether just, is at least better than slavery and serfdom.
There of course could be strong argument that the nation owes the
Negro something better than harsh industrial competition just after
slavery, but the Negro does not ask the payment of debts that are
dead. He is perfectly willing to come into competition with immigrants
from any part of the world, to welcome them as human beings and as
fellows in the struggle for life, to struggle with them and for them
and for a greater South and a better nation. But the black man
certainly has a right to ask, when he starts into this race, that he
be allowed to start with hands untied and brain unclouded (see Note
17).
Such in bare outline is the economic history of the South. It is the
story of an attempt to degrade working men. It failed in 1860, after
it had sought for centuries to reduce laborers to the level of
purchasable cattle; it failed in 1870, after a fearful catastrophe
while endeavoring to revive this system under another name; it has
failed since then satisfactorily to maintain the present rural serfdom
or to establish a disfranchised caste of artisans; and it will fail in
the future to keep the stubbornly up-struggling masses of black
laborers down, by shackling their souls and loading immigrants atop of
them. It will always fail unless indeed, as sometimes seems possible,
both Church and State in America shall refuse longer to listen to the
teaching of Jesus when He said: "Come unto Me all ye that labor and
are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.
"Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in
heart: and ye shall find rest for your souls.
"For My yoke is easy and My burden is light."
* * * * *